


Whole

by giantessmess



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-18 22:05:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13109436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giantessmess/pseuds/giantessmess
Summary: From a very early age Cat knew she wasn't alone. She knew she shared her life with someone else, somehow. Even if it made no sense to anybody else.





	Whole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkheart9459](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkheart9459/gifts).



There’s always a logical explanation for the things you feel, but can’t explain. If you see things that nobody else can see, hear things that nobody else can hear? Well, you’re making it up for attention. You’re sick. Or worse, crazy. The logic being: if you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras.

For Cat, it happened at age three and half. She wandered into her father’s study, clutching her teddy bear, and proceeded to chatter about how blue her new friend’s eyes were. How pretty her flowing robes. How much fun she was to play with.

Her dad was unfazed. Playing pretend was fine; she was a child after all. And at this early stage it all sounded like playing to Oliver Grant. An imaginary friend. A flight of fancy, like Santa Claus. He lifted his daughter up into his lap and tickled her. 

“What’s your friend’s name, Kitty?”

Cat’s face was a mask of toddler seriousness when she answered.

“Kara Zor-El. She’s from a whole ‘nother planet!”

Katherine Grant wasn’t a big fan of pretend. It had a time and place. Toddler ballet classes? Absolutely a place for creativity. But wandering around the house chattering to thin air? Laughing with a figment and ignoring friends, neighbors, relatives? Something about it made her nervous. But it was cute enough on the surface, and her daughter was only three. 

But then she turned four. Five. Six. Seven. What is cute when you have a toddler lisp is less cute when you can tie your own shoelaces. Even Cat’s father had to agree on that. This wasn’t an imaginary friend. This was an illness.

And so, Cat’s mother drew together a collection of specialists—therapists, psychiatrists. Doctors who would watch the child play, and write extensive notes on a clipboard. There was a pill Cat could take, but it was best to wait on that one. The doctors were concerned, but not overly. She could grow out of it. She didn’t truly seem to have schizophrenia. She was just a little too imaginative. 

But it became clear to Cat early on: talking to Kara was a punishable offence. It was strange. It made her a strange child. A bullied child. And so she learned to keep her chatter to the spaces her mother couldn’t find her. She’d whisper to her friend late at night. She leaned to speak without talking, to share with a projected feeling. A warmth sent across the connection. The pure happiness that Kara often sent back jolted her, made her laugh out loud. Her schoolmates would look at her funny. But by then she had given up on trying to win them over. She was the crazy girl, to them. The girl who didn’t need anyone, who kept to herself and whispered while gazing up at a point in the sky that no one else could see.

* * *

When it came, the pain changed everything. Cat had just turned thirteen the week before. She'd been asleep, but woke up in bed screaming, and wouldn’t stop until they’d restrained her. The pain made her see white, made her taste metal. Every cell felt emptied, her bones hollow. Her heartbeat dimmer. 

She didn’t realize what had truly happened until she woke in the hospital, her mind still dulled from the morphine coursing through her. She knew, suddenly, what the pain meant. She was alone. 

The deep ache never left her. Doctors said it was probably part of her mental illness, (Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. A fun thing to look up in your local library.) They allowed her to try various painkillers, but were clear that it wouldn’t help, not when her pain was psychosomatic. _You’re just crazy_ , was the implication. If no one else can sense it, the problem must be you. The pain felt real enough to Cat. As real as the girl had been.

* * *

Cat found ways to cope with being hollow. It almost felt normal, after a decade, then two. She had her coping mechanisms: booze, a conga-line of prescription meds, some more helpful than others. And a failed marriage, coupled with a son she lost in the aftermath. She was so used to being this way, being hollow, that it seemed strange that it bothered her ex-husband. He would get frustrated by her lack of feeling. _There’s no way I’m letting you anywhere near this kid, Cat. Heartless. You’re frosted to your core, aren’t you?_

And if she was feared and disliked by friends, by colleagues? Well, that was a necessary pitfall of doing business. Of being the boss. She had almost forgotten what it felt like, to care deeply. Holding the pain close made it hard to have room for anything else. And it made her a ruthless businesswoman. A brilliant strategist. She tried not to think about the people she lost along the way. The bridges burned. The work she could no longer do because she had broken something or someone in order to do it.

The change, when it came, was as much of a shock as the first jolt of pain had been. Cat awoke, her skin on fire. Hot and cold and then unable to take a breath. She thought she was dying. A heart attack? A stroke? But no. Suddenly, everything seemed to shift and blur. Her vision cleared. Her heart thrummed like it hadn’t in twenty-five years. Her breaths were stronger. The world had a different tint to it. Her eyesight was keener and her mind immediately filled with layers of information, multitudes. All the empty parts were no longer empty.  
Cat didn’t need anyone to tell her. She was no longer alone. She could feel her other, like a twin, sharing her pulse, her breath, her mind. She sobbed out of happiness, and when she fell asleep she dreamed of blue eyes.

She tried not to feel disappointed when she woke the next day and found that her old friend wouldn’t speak to her. She knew it was reckless, to wish for it. To want a hallucination to talk back. She’d been told all her life that this was all in her head. She couldn’t explain it, but her friend’s return brought back all sorts of feelings. A sense of certainty. A completeness. Cat carefully kept quiet about this new development when she saw her therapist. And she tried to keep work the same. To remain cold and impersonal, if only outwardly. Catco was thriving and needed a strong hand. But it was so much harder now. She often had to take a moment to think things through. To talk things out. She felt a deep sorrow, looking back at the people she'd hurt in the past, and made efforts to mend things, to reach out. It was hard not to care.

With the renewed connection came a deep urgency. A _need_ to find this person who seemed to share her heart. For the girl was a real person. She had to be. Cat knew she wasn’t crazy. But whenever she tried to reach out, she was met with deep despair. A sadness, a mourning that Cat could only try and wrap up with affection. She didn’t understand what was happening, and she woke with tears in her eyes most nights. Every time she tried to connect, she felt pain. But this pain she could handle, because she wasn’t alone.

But one morning, she tried again. 

“I know you’re there. Please talk to me, Kara.”

There was nothing for some time, until she received a single, sobbed word.

“Alone.”

And so, she had her answer.

It’s not that Cat had given up. She hadn’t. Her heart felt full again, even if she hurt in new different ways, she still _felt_. So what if the person on the other side of this connection didn’t want her? It made her ache, but Cat was happier than she had been since those horrific events at age thirteen. Now she could breathe and laugh and exist like a normal person again. And so, she tried to find someone who could want her.

And it was sweet, sweeter than any romantic attempt she’d ever had because she could _feel_ it. Even the tinge of hurt from the other side of the connection didn’t bother her much. Because the relationship gave her a son. Carter, who she was able to care for with a love deep in her bones. And if the relationship with his father fell apart too quickly, the pain from that was easily fixed. Because she could feel the connection, still. Could feel that her other self loved the child as well.

* * *

It became normal; being so connected and yet strangely bereft. Knowing there was someone who was always with her, but who seemed just out of reach. Cat’s heart still shared its beat, and her emotions still ebbed and flowed through that lifeline. But she counted herself as lucky. She had Carter, who was turning ten soon. She had Catco. She tried to be happy with that. Still, in the last few months Cat had felt a new intensity in the connection. Even without talking back, the girl shared snippets of herself by accident. Errant thoughts, feelings of pride and accomplishment. Excitement. And then nerves.

Cat didn’t think twice about the nerves, though they seemed to intensify on a particular morning. She had enough to worry about that day. First, with the useless assistant that she had to fire. And then the certainty that her 10.15 would only bring another disappointing Millennial. 

Cat didn’t even look up when the applicant walked in. Not until she heard a gasp.

Blue eyes. And nervous chattering, the kind Cat remembered from her childhood. She didn’t realize she had gotten up, that she was walking over, until she was reaching for the girl’s hand. 

“Oh.”

Cat had been wrong. The feeling of wholeness from before was nothing like this. As they touched, the girl’s mind opened to her, and Cat saw endless stars surrounded by blackness. She saw a world of strange spices, spired buildings and a red sun. Neither of them were capable of speech, it seemed. At least not for a while. Cat had forgotten where she was. She didn’t even realize that people outside her office were watching them, until the computer elf came in. He asked something inane, something faraway that she didn’t fully listen to.

“Out,” she said, and he scattered. Cat looked back at her friend, her twin made flesh, and nodded towards the balcony. The girl followed, eyes wide. Cat made sure to shut the sliding door. She leaned back against the railing for support, and to hide how much she was shaking.

“How…” Cat let out a breath. “It was all real.”

“I don’t even know where to begin.”

The girl’s voice was as familiar as her own. It made Cat want to laugh, to cry.

“I know the feeling,” Cat said, and then she simply stared. Took in the sight of the cheap dress, the pink cardigan, the luminous blonde hair. And the eyes. Those blue eyes, piercing even under her glasses. “Kara Danvers? I remember it being more sci-fi sounding, somehow.”

“Well,” Kara stared at her in wonder, but she grinned. The smile sent something electric through Cat. “I remember you being called Kitty.”

“Not since I was thirteen,” Cat said. 

Kara seemed to turn serious then.

“I was surprised,” she said. “When I found out that you don’t have soulmates on Earth.”

“Soulmates.”

Kara nodded.

Cat opened her mouth. Closed it. The implications made her feel a little faint, and yet it seemed right somehow. It felt true. But she quickly sensed fear, remorse, through their connection. Kara began to babble. 

“I’m sorry,” Kara said. “I’m so sorry I stopped…It was so awful when I landed, and I didn’t know how…”

“Kara,” Cat wanted to reach out and touch her again. But it was so overwhelming, simply being in her presence. “Let me start by saying I can’t hire you. I think there may be a teensy conflict there.”

Kara smiled.

“I figured.”

“Also, why the hell aren’t you older?”

“Um…” Kara let out a breath. “That’s a bit of a long story, actually.”

Cat looked around. The balcony was quiet, far away from the cacophony of the work inside. She took Kara’s hand, and felt a rush of excitement at what was to come. She led them to the one of the couches. 

“Do you have time now?”


End file.
